The Marshal Makes His Report (23 page)

‘By tomorrow there’ll be a warrant out for his arrest. He’ll be taken to Borgo Ognissanti. I want you to come round there—let’s say eleven o’clock—you know where I mean, do you?’ That was the only moment he couldn’t resist a sidelong glance and caught the glitter of Leo’s tiny eye.

‘What’s hearsay can be ignored. When it comes to a written statement . . . you see what I mean. Now, if you’re on the spot—and I’m only asking you to come, I’m not accusing you of anything and it’s not a trick and then you’ll be arrested. If I want to arrest you I know where to find you. If you’re on the spot and looking him in the eye, he’ll not have such an easy time telling a pack of lies, will he? Turn off here, Lorenzini. We’ll take this gentleman back to his club.’

When they got there, Leo was more than a little disconcerted by their getting out of the car and accompanying him right to the door where Leo’s substitute bouncer looked a lot more surprised to see him return than he had to see him go.

‘Enjoy your night off, then.’ The Marshal stood there with Lorenzini beside him and Leo had no option but to go down the stairs towards the throbbing darkness of the disco. He didn’t look back at them. When he had gone through the door at the bottom, the Marshal, too, descended the stairs to speak to the two people behind the cash desk.

‘One of you the manager?’

A man on his feet behind the cashier spoke up.

‘I’m the owner.’

‘How many people does this place hold officially?’

‘I . . . a hundred and fifty, but . . .’

‘How many are down there now?’

‘Oh Christ!’

‘And how many of them have no membership cards?’

‘Listen, I know who’s behind all this. We’ve been closed down at least every two months this year and all because I don’t slip an envelope to the right man on the council and the people who do pay up don’t want me surviving—’

‘I haven’t counted them,’ the Marshal said, ‘and I haven’t looked at anybody’s membership card.’

The owner was brought up short. ‘What’s it about, then?’

‘Your bouncer, Leo Mori.’

‘Leo? He’s all right. What’s he done? How come he went out with you?’

‘It may be that when I’ve gone,’ the Marshal said, staring hard first at the owner and then at the cashier, ‘he’ll make a telephone call. Is that the only phone behind you?’

‘Yes, but—’

‘I want to know who he calls, if that’s possible, and I certainly need to know what he says. Got that?’

‘All right. But Leo—’

‘Don’t you worry about Leo. He’s involved in something a lot more serious than letting too many customers into a club. When he’s made the call come outside and tell me. Our car will be out of sight but we’ll see you.’

They left, parked the car out of sight and settled down to wait. Every now and then the radio crackled and hummed and the two men outside Tiny’s flat reported all quiet.

‘I hope I didn’t frighten him too much,’ the Marshal said.

‘You frightened me,’ Lorenzini ventured to admit, but the Marshal only gave him a funny look, not understanding. They sat in darkness and silence for some time, Lorenzini wondering if this were the moment to ask just what was going on. He knew from experience that the Marshal didn’t deliberately leave him in the dark. He was just unaware of the fact that his thoughts weren’t audible and would often say, ‘But you knew that’ or ‘Surely I told you.’ He glanced at him now, a still, expressionless bulk. Perhaps he should just wait and see . . .

A yawn escaped him.

‘You’re exhausted,’ the Marshal said, coming to and noticing. ‘Well, it should be over by tonight.’

‘What, exactly?’ Lorenzini had seen his chance. ‘I mean, that letter . . . for you it changed everything.’

‘Cleared a lot of things up, that letter. Whys and wherefores. Motives.’

‘But not whether it really was a suicide.’

‘No.’

Lorenzini waited a bit, but nothing further was forthcoming and the audible sigh he let out as he leaned back in his seat produced no effect.

It had been a very sober and ill-looking William who had met the Marshal at the doors of the Palazzo Ulderighi earlier. The Marshal himself, after his visit to Neri, had been feeling rather low and at first the sight of William cheered him. Then he looked at him more closely in the gloom.

‘Are you all right?

‘Yes. No, not really, but it doesn’t matter. I’ve been to your office. They said I might find you here.’

The Marshal tried to glance at his watch. He wanted to be out on Leo’s tail before long. This being his night off he wouldn’t be so easy to watch.

‘I won’t keep you long. If you have to get back I’ll go with you. Only too glad to be away from this place.’

‘It would be better.’ And a good deal more private without Grillo lurking.

In the Marshal’s office William sat clutching his tightly rolled umbrella. His face was pale. An angry red spot was turning septic on his chin.

‘I imagine I made a fool of myself. I usually do when I’ve had too much to drink.’

For a moment, the Marshal couldn’t think what he was talking about, then he remembered.

‘Ah, well. No harm done. You surely didn’t come round here just to apologize for having had a glass of wine too many?’

‘No. I do apologize, though, if I . . . I don’t know how much I said.’

‘Very little. You fell asleep. I gathered you were worried about your sister.’

‘I didn’t say why?’

‘No.’

‘I want you to read this.’ He gave the Marshal a letter still in its envelope, addressed to William in Venice and postmarked Florence. The Marshal opened it.

‘But this—I’m sorry, it’s in English.’

‘I’ve translated it for you on the back of the pages. It took me all afternoon. I didn’t want to interfere. She was going to be upset enough as it was without her having to be involved with the police. I thought if she came back Sunday I could at least talk to her first. I’m sorry. You’re trying to read. I hope you won’t think ill of her because she’s the most honest, good person I’ve ever known. I’m sorry . . .’

Dear W,

Tried to phone you this a.m. but you were out or asleep and I think it was just as well—for me, anyway. You could have said ‘I told you so’. Of course it was impossible without first finding another flat. I did try—to find another flat, I mean—but it fell through. So: you can’t leave somebody who won’t be left. You’ve got to have cooperation. We had it out, or tried to, but he could only see it as an either-or menace on my part. At least you know it wasn’t that. I wish I had more experience. Neither of us have—you and me, I mean. Why is that? Anyway, I couldn’t for shame tell any of my girlfriends because of a feeling that they’d laugh at me. I can only tell you the truth, which is that I’m so attached to him in a way I can’t explain that to tolerate the wrench of leaving him, which I theoretically did, I needed huge amounts of support and comfort and a shoulder to cry on and the only person I could turn to for all that was him. Every night since I ‘left him’ he has come down and just held me and let me cry. Nothing else. He won’t ask me for anything else but he won’t leave me either and I know he’s winning. That’s the wrong word, I suppose, but that’s the way it is. I might as well be a tiny child trying to leave its mother. Father, you’d say. I know you think he’s a father substitute but what if that’s what I really need? I mean, crutches are a sort of leg substitute but if you’ve lost your leg you’d better learn to put up with them, or what? I don’t know. In my more desperate moments of attempted flight I made a plan for you and me to go back to England, convince whoever’s in our old house to sell it to us (for peanuts, of course) so we could start again. Start what? The problems are all mixed up together and nobody knows them all except you, so I can’t tell anyone else. I can hear them saying, ‘What can you expect if you have an affair with a married man?’ and the squalor of it makes me shudder.

It’s not squalid. It’s not an ‘affair’. Does everybody say that? I suppose so, they all think their case is different. I wish I were less ingenuous but I’m afraid it’s a question of character rather than experience. I just know I’ll always be like that. Tried my usual cure of ‘there’s always someone worse off than yourself, etc.’ this morning when you didn’t answer. Went up to see Neri. Each time I see him I’m more touched by his delicacy and amazed by his brain. It flickers like a dying fire. He was translating the ode ‘To Phyllis’ and gave it to me. Tiny intense writing—trails of ivy to bind your shining hair—it reminds him of me, he said. What would he think, feel, if he knew? If we could get away from this house and take him with us. Dickensian nonsense. He is part of this house and dying with it and Buongianni can’t bear to see him. He can’t bear it because he
cares.
If he didn’t . . .

If you were here you would make me laugh, no matter what. Is that the English in us? It’s the only thing lacking with Buongianni. Italians don’t laugh at themselves. Poor Neri. This house and his mother will kill him in the end and, even though I know that, I have this feeling that if he were taken away from here he’d die at once. Ever since I’ve lived here I’ve thought about death. I think you’d better come and make me laugh before it’s too late. In the meantime I’ll listen to some Mozart. I’ve booked my ticket for the 12th, the first time in my life I’ve booked a scheduled flight but I want to be able to get back at once if I feel I need to, or stay on and go through with it, in which case I’ll stay three days to get over it and be back Thursday the 24th. I don’t want to go through with it. More than anything I hate the assumption by everybody concerned that it’s automatic. Not once has anyone said, What are you going to do? Even Flavia, who was the one to tell me, only said I could have it done here but that England might be better as Florence being so small it would get out. I don’t care whether it gets out or not. It’s funny, that, I’ve tried to think I should care but I can’t. Who is there who’d care—I mean about me? You, and I’ve told you. Buongianni and I’ve told him. My ‘everybody concerned’ excludes him, you know that. He wants a child. I want it. And the only, the sensible thing to do—according to everybody else, that is, seems to me
really
squalid. I can’t even write the word, I don’t even think it to myself, so how do I go through with the reality? I don’t believe I will. It’s so negative. It would be a sort of death for me too. Could I manage on my own, though? Not financially. And if he can’t get away from here can you see me just taking money from him? Can you see me as a kept woman?

New paragraph, new thought. I won’t decide about the operation until I’m away from here. Away from this house. When I’ve decided I’ll tell him. I have this feeling that either I’ll come back on Sunday and go through with the whole thing— what can La Ulderighi
do
when it comes down to it? Or else I’ll give up the child and Buongianni. Either way wait for me. I’ll need you (if only to make me laugh).

Love,

Catherine.

‘I don’t know what to do,’ William admitted as the Marshal refolded the letter.

‘Have you eaten?’

‘What?’

‘Have you had any supper?’

‘No, no, I haven’t but—’

‘Go out and have a decent meal, you look like death warmed up. Shouldn’t you be back in Venice by this time, anyway?’

‘The others have gone but I have to wait for Catherine, if she comes . . .’

‘You don’t think she will?’

‘I’m afraid that if she—if she decided not to have the child, and that’s the way it looks now, doesn’t it?—then she may have given up on the whole thing like she says . . . And if she told him, then maybe that’s why he killed himself. But what if she felt just as badly as he did? You understand that after a thing like that she’d be very depressed and then if she heard . . .’

‘Likewise, you’d have heard by now. Surely she’ll be staying with friends—and in any case you expect her back tomorrow.’

‘I might ring round a few of her friends in England, anyway.’

‘Do,’ the Marshal said, ‘if it will make you feel better—but have that meal first. All right?’

‘All right. I will.’ He made an attempt at being his usual witty self. ‘If I were as big as you I wouldn’t get so easily squashed. It’s people tripping over you by accident that gets you down. I’ve no appetite, to be honest. ‘I
won’t
have any soup today, Oh
take
the nasty soup away!’

‘You have a good big bowl of spaghetti. And get a steak down you. No. If you don’t mind, I’ll keep the letter just for now.’

Though whether it would be more or less likely to do a vanishing act out of his possession or William’s he couldn’t have said. At any rate he buttoned it into his pocket and there it still was.

‘Did you ever think,’ Lorenzini mused aloud in the darkness of the parked car, ‘that there must be quite a few telephones in a place as big as the Ulderighi’s apartments, so that if she did call him from England whatever she had to say—’

‘Yes, I did think of it,’ the Marshal said. ‘And I imagine that two intelligent people like Corsi and Catherine Yorke would have thought of it, too.’

‘I suppose—There he is!’

‘Get out and catch him at the corner and watch out for Leo himself showing up.’

Lorenzini jumped out of the car and beckoned to the owner of the disco, who looked furtively over his shoulder before he approached. The Marshal wound down his window.

‘Well?’

‘He telephoned.’

‘Who to?’

‘I don’t know. That’s the truth, he didn’t say. He just said “It’s me. Listen.” Then the other person did all the talking with Leo just protesting here and there. One thing he did say clearly and that was, “Listen, you shit, it’s me who’s got the protection, you could be out there on your own if I say the word.” Something of that sort anyway, it’s not word for word. Then a bit more iffing and butting and effing and blinding and they seem to have agreed to meet. At least, Leo insisted on it, but whether the other one was willing or not I don’t know.’

‘Agreed to meet where? Where?’

‘Usual place. That’s all he said. “Usual place. Be there.” If that’s all I’d better get back. If Leo comes out and sees me here . . .’

‘You’re his employer, aren’t you?’